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Anyone attending the latest industry conferences, reading the trade press, or viewing analyst reports can be forgiven for thinking that the entire world has suddenly become digitized. But we're not quite there yet -- most organizations are still in the midst of an often painful evolution to shed manual processes and stovepiped systems to bring themselves closer to the digital realm. And the benefits aren't so clear cut yet.

Going "digital" is today's call to arms across the business landscape, and the changes being wrought are potentially far-reaching. Becoming a digital business means employing information technology to manage operations, as well as develop and deliver new products and services. As a recent thought leadership piece released by Accenture puts it: "industrial companies are becoming customer service companies. Consumer products companies are becoming Internet companies. Energy companies are becoming information companies. And media and entertainment companies are becoming logistics companies."

These changes arising out of the digital and cloud movement has both memorized and terrorized business leaders of every stripe. I say "terrorized" because the ground is shifting beneath everyone's feet across a range of industries. Newspapers have felt the blow, retailers are being stung, and insurance companies see a new breed of competitors arising out of the Internet stew.

What's the role of cloud computing in these digital-driven shifts? Ultimately, cloud provides a foundation that is making things happen. But simply subscribing to cloud -- or even building a private cloud -- does not automatically transform a company into digital mode. Rather, it is a key step in a long-term evolutionary process, and part of many things that are going on at once. Over the long term, what's notable about these shifts in business models is the underlying premise that is affecting just about every business: everyone, to some degree, is becoming both a consumer and provider of cloud-based software.

As Accenture observes in its report, IT has become the business:

"A huge shift is under way. Boundaries are blurring in many dimensions—not just between IT leaders and their business colleagues, but between digital assets and physical resources and between enterprises and their customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. IT strategy and business strategy are no longer separate; they have become inseparable."

To get to this digital nirvana, Accenture sees several paths to be taken simultaneously, including adoption of "hyperscale" computing that enables processing of massive amounts of data. Every organization will approach the challenge differently, employing many variations of both cloud and on-premises systems. "This means that for the foreseeable future, enterprise infrastructures will be, by necessity, hybrid solutions," the report states. This consists of "weaving hyperscale cloud, on premise, specialized hardware, and an enterprise’s existing systems into a computing fabric."

Along with hyperscale computing, Accenture foresees a resurgence of middleware -- a services layer that will sit between abstracted systems and front-end end-user applications. This is a natural role for cloud computing, but don't expect cloud to address all these requirements overnight -- or even over the next few years. As Accenture puts it: "It’s not possible to use a single platform to handle every business requirement. And don’t assume that cloud will always be the answer either." Accenture says its latest data shows only 7 percent of applications currently reside in the cloud, which is projected to increase to 33 percent by 2020. Instead, the report's authors observe, "companies will need to adopt a hybrid mindset, with different platforms, local and in the cloud, for different sets of business needs. Abstraction of the back-end services will have to be a step-by-step process, starting with the highest-priority business needs."

Not everyone is a fan of the hybrid computing approach as a pathway to the digital enterprise, however. Technology observer Esteban Kolsky, for one, says "the underlying infrastructure for digital transformation is an open cloud infrastructure" -- not private or hybrid cloud. "I don’t recognize private cloud as being cloud, nor hosted applications as being cloud – but they are good interim steps, stepping-stones towards adopting the cloud in larger, more complex, compliance-heavy organizations; they don’t have a long life ahead of them, but they are a good starting point."

Indeed, cloud represents a good starting point in the digital journey. But it is an enabler, a tool. It's up to enlightened business leaders and managers to do the rest.